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Stanley Elkin, The Art of Fiction No. 61

Interviewed by Thomas LeClair

Issue 66, Summer 1976

The following interview was taped in September 1974, in St. Louis, without aid of sherry, or sunlight streaming through high windows. Although we did walk through leaf-piled streets to Elkin’s office on the Washington University campus, I didn’t discard my prepared questions along the way. When the tape broke midway through the interview, Elkin was not upset. Despite these defiances of interview conventions, the three-hour interview demonstrates the wide range of Elkin’s perception, candor, and wit.

Elkin is a medium-sized man, forty-five years old. The day of our talk he wore corduroys and a white turtleneck sweater and could easily have been mistaken for a distinguished poet. Physically intense, Elkin shifted about in his chair, sometimes hunching over the microphone like a body puncher, sometimes sitting back with his hands behind his head like a satisfied president. His voice constantly juggled humor and seriousness, but his answers were always direct, without qualification.

Elkin’s novels are: Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), A Bad Man (1967), The Dick Gibson Show (1971), and The Franchiser, which Elkin was working on at the time of the interview and will be published this June by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; he is also the author of Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, a collection of short stories (1966) and Searches and Seizures, novellas (1973).

INTERVIEWER

Your father was a salesman. I can’t help but wonder if he was a master rhetorician—as many of your characters are—and if the passionate speech that characterizes so much of your fiction has its genesis in your early environment.

STANLEY ELKIN

If not a master rhetorician, at least a master salesman. He sold costume jewelry, and I went with him once on one of his trips through the Midwest. He had a vast territory. He had Michigan, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, parts of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri—an immense territory. I was with him in small Indiana towns where he would take the jewelry out of the telescopes, which are salesmen’s cases, and actually put the earrings on his ears, the bracelets around his wrists, and the necklaces about his throat. This wasn’t drag, but the prose passionate and stage business of his spiel. The man believed in costume jewelry, in rhinestones and beads, and sang junk jewelry’s meteorological condition—its Fall line and Spring.

INTERVIEWER

Is there something of your father in Feldman’s father?

ELKIN

Yes, and a great deal in Feldman. Probably more in Feldman than his father.

INTERVIEWER

Your mother’s name was Feldman. Do you bestow, as Nabokov does, details of your own life on your characters?

ELKIN

No. There is little autobiography in my work. When I was growing up, we had a bungalow in New Jersey which we visited in the summers. Everybody in that small community was named Feldman and was either an aunt or cousin of mine. I just found it comfortable to use the name Feldman. For a long time before I ever published anything, all my characters were named Stephen Feldman. I hadn’t read Joyce, I didn’t know about Dedalus. But it didn’t make any difference what story it was or what age the characters were. I named them all Stephen Feldman. And then, only later, years later, when I was writing A Bad Man, did the name come to mean anything to me—Feldman the felled man.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you spent just under 183 years going from freshman to Ph.D. at Illinois.

ELKIN

Right.

INTERVIEWER

Were you writing stories while getting your M.A. and Ph.D.? You were in the army too, weren’t you?

ELKIN

Yes, for a couple of years—1955 to 1957. The remarkable thing, remarkable for me anyway, was that I discovered that I could write only after I passed my prelims. I had been writing and chopping away at stuff, at this story or that. I took all the writing courses, but I had no style—or, rather, I did have a style but it wasn’t mine. I had William Faulkner’s style. I studied a year in bed—never got out of bed for an entire year, had all the books around the bed. I’d get up to teach my classes, of course, but I taught from eight to ten in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Then I’d return to the apartment and get back into bed and not get up until it was time to teach my classes again. But at any rate, I decided to give myself some time to write, and I wrote a story called “On a Field, Rampant.” It was the first story that I’d ever written that had what was to become my style.

INTERVIEWER

How much influence does your academic training have on your writing? Do you work into your fiction the intricate patterns of imagery that much academic criticism is concerned with?

ELKIN

Well, it depends upon the fiction. When I was about a hundred pages into Boswell, I suddenly discovered that I had Boswell in a lot of elevators, and because I had been trained in the New Criticism I decided, hey, this is pretty neat! Elevators. Makes a nice pattern. And so I was conscious of the elevator motif and kept moving him in and out of elevators. In a way it works because a great deal of novelistic fiction is about ascent. Since Boswell was a guy on the make and had this sort of excelsior personality, it was quite fitting for him to be in elevators, on up escalators, and to climb stairs. There’s one scene in Boswell where he’s in a Jewish community in Brooklyn, as I recall, to meet a miracle rabbi, and he can’t get past the front door. He is not permitted to climb those stairs and is stalled. Sure, I’m conscious of symbols and patterns in my work. But this is something I’ve sometimes come onto only after the fact and then made the most of.

INTERVIEWER

You said in your dissertation on Faulkner that he sympathized with the “egocentric will pitted against something stronger than itself.”

ELKIN

Maybe that’s what I admire, or what I came to admire, in Faulkner without knowing that it is what I was ultimately to be about myself. But I think it is what I am ultimately about. And I think it is true in Faulkner. I think it is truer of me, though, than it is of Faulkner. Faulkner’s heroes are often nicer guys than mine.

INTERVIEWER

You also commented on Faulkner’s legendizing of character through hyperbole and his repetitive technique. These seem to show up in your fiction.

ELKIN

My editor at Random House, Joe Fox, used to tell me, “Stanley, less is more.” He wanted to strike—oh, he had a marvelous eye for the “good” stuff—and that’s what he wanted to strike. I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess because I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough. There’s a famous exchange between Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe in which Fitzgerald criticizes Wolfe for one of his novels. Fitzgerald tells him that Flaubert believed in the mot précis and that there are two kinds of writers—the putter-inners and the taker-outers. Wolfe, who probably was not as good a writer as Fitzgerald but evidently wrote a better letter, said, “Flaubert me no Flauberts. Shakespeare was a putter-inner, Melville was a putter-inner.”* I can’t remember who else was a putter-inner, but I’d rather be a putter-inner than a taker-outer.

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Wells Tower

"Down through the Valley"

Salon, November 2001

We reached the car, and I held the door open for him, but he didn't climb in right away. He stood there rocking on his crutch, gazing off at the sky and the fields and the fall trees starting to go the color of sherbet

"Down through the Valley"

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We reached the car, and I held the door open for him, but he didn't climb in right away. He stood there rocking on his crutch, gazing off at the sky and the fields and the fall trees starting to go the color of sherbet

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